The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  ABC’s Wide World of Sports, on the other hand, did their usual respectful and professional job when covering events like the Makaha International, and the U.S. Championships. The camera work was first-rate, and commentators treated surfers no differently then they treated quarterbacks or Formula One stars.

  Southern California surfers also had access to at least three regional low-budget surf-theme variety shows, including KHJ-TV’s Surf’s Up, hosted by radio DJ Stan Richards. Each half-hour episode featured a clip or two from the latest surf movie, a studio interview with a guest celebrity surfer, and news on upcoming surfing events. A few of the interviews were worth sitting through, and the TV audience—almost exclusively surfers—ate up the action clips. Richards, though, was a hapless anchor, as was made clear during KHJ’s coverage of the 1964 Malibu Invitational, when he turned to cohost and surf journalist Robert Feigel and reportedly said, “Tell me, Bob, can a goofyfoot do the hotdog, and if so, what foot does he use?”

  Surfing was meanwhile getting ready to take its first turn on America’s fashion runway. In the early sixties, surfwear was still mostly an in-house project. An ambitious new San Diego outfit called Hang Ten was about to pass Katin and the other mom-and-pop beachfront garmentos to become the sport’s top-selling label, expanding their line from just trunks to shirts and windbreakers. Hang Ten was also the first surf-wear business to license its name; by decade’s end the company had written $25 million in total international sales, and pushed the brand logo—a pair of chubby black-thread “hang ten” feet stitched into a yellow square—until it was surfing’s most recognizable mark.

  MIDSIXTIES AD SHOOT FOR HANG TEN BEACHWEAR.

  Mainstream active-wear companies got into the act, and by 1963 McGregor, Jantzen, White Stag, and Catalina all offered a full line of “surfer look” trunks, knit T-shirts, nylon jackets, and pullovers, which were available in department store outlets across the country. Loud colors were the rule for both sexes. “Male plumage,” one fashion expert noted when reviewing the 1964 surfwear lines, “should be as brilliant as women’s.” Trends flashed past in quick succession: Madras-print cotton, then dark solids with offsetting white-tape trim, faux tapa cloth, and wrong-side-out Polynesian prints (for the “faded” look). Surfwear even borrowed from hot-rodders, as competition stripes briefly appeared on just about every solid-color piece of clothing.

  Cosmo, Look, Sports Illustrated—magazine publishers loved to run surf fashion layouts. The clothes were new and hip. Better still were all those young, slim, California-tanned legs, arms, shoulders, backs, and stomachs. Surfing had always been sexy. Duke Kahanamoku emerging from the water at Waikiki provoked swoons among both male and female admirers. But fashion ramped things up considerably—the board-toting “lucky sons of beaches” in Playboy’s 1967 “Wet Set” fashion spread are all groped, or at least admiringly checked out, by three bikini-wearing models.

  The beach fashion hook was set permanently into the minds and wallets of American consumers. The new styles were loose, comfortable, and inexpensive, and the Western World was steadily if incrementally moving toward a more casual dress style—with JFK doing his part over family weekends at Hyannis Port, in his black-frame Wayfarer sunglasses (same as the Malibu guys) and shirttail left out to flap in the warm Atlantic breeze. Surf music and beach movies would vanish at the end of the boom and never again have the same cultural presence. Surfwear fell out of style too, but only temporarily. There were more booms to come, and they’d be fueled start to finish by surfing’s fashion houses.

  * * *

  Surfers were a real Rorschach test for newspaper editors. The Los Angeles Times, a leading news voice in a region that wasn’t yet sure how it felt about being the world’s wave-riding capital, often went out of its way to be supportive of surfing, with articles like “Surfer’s Utopia . . . That’s the Southland,” and “Surfing Just a Fad? Forget it—Sport Is Here to Stay.” A smiling gang of USC students posed for a Times feature, and a father-son surf-themed dinner at the Holy Shepherd Lutheran Church in Chatsworth earned double-column coverage. The paper also at times showed a mothering concern for surfers’ health and well-being, with lots of features on surf-related injuries and ocean preparedness, including three separate articles in 1965 on “surfer’s knots”—the acorn-sized bumps, caused by knee-paddling, that formed on the lower knee and bony peak of the upper foot. Surfer’s knots made it onto a Times list of surfing “wounds,” along with spinal damage and skeg cuts, but really they were a pain-free status marker—huge knots proved you were getting more water time than the other guys. They were also a potential 4F ace in the hole, as a truly oversized set prevented a surfer from fitting into U.S. Army-issue boots.

  Other Southland papers took a much dimmer view the sport. A 1961 Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram front-page feature was titled “Surfboard Cult! New Way of Life,” and the portrayal here was ominous: “The Pacific is washing up new troubles on the West Coast—the surfboard riders.” What kind of trouble? Stolen boards set afire “as sacrifice to an imaginary ‘Surf God’,” lots of “trespassing, petty theft, truancy, and vandalism,” plus “older surfers who infect younger boys with an ambition not to have any.” A Laguna Beach high school football coach talked about a once-promising young player now lost to surfing. “He’s down at the beach [learning] how to cuss and drink wine. Maybe to steal. He’s already getting shifty-eyed. He’s a bum.” Then a final warning: “There’s a certain glamour to these blonde, suntanned, rebellious youngsters. Teenage girls go for them [and] parents are becoming alarmed about their daughters seeing surfers. Police reports tell of beer-and-sex parties involving girls of 14.”

  The sex fears were probably justified. Every Southern California beach town had its own community of indulgent, prestripped teenage surfers, with a bottomless store of free time, lots of roomy surf wagons parked nearby, and a short list of parent-free weekend-night house parties to cruise.

  Other accusations made by the newspapers were debatable. Surfers probably did break the law at a rate above that of middle- and upper-middle-class suburban American teenagers. But the difference was incremental, and the crimes were almost always misdemeanors. The Press-Telegram litany of surfer infractions—trespassing, petty theft, truancy, and vandalism—covered things pretty well, although it failed to include public nudity, bad language, and a heckling disrespect for lifeguards and police. A Santa Monica surfing area was closed after surfers yelled profanities at lifeguards. A few Southland auditoriums refused to show surf movies once audience members began to light fireworks, throw beer cups, and moon each other. Surfboard theft was common enough that the Huntington Beach Police Department created a special stolen-goods form with a surfboard-shaped outline that allowed victims to fill in colors, decal placement, and any other identifying characteristics.

  News sources like the Independent Press-Telegram were eager to put surfers in league with bikers, pachucos, or any other “troubled” youth group. Add together every last bit of surfer-generated “rowdyism,” however, and you were still a mile short of anything that even remotely looked like the Boozefighter motorcycle gang’s rampage in Hollister or the Zoot Suit race riots in Los Angeles. Maybe surfers were deviants. But it was a suburban deviancy. Foul language and naked asses, mostly. Not blood and chains.

  * * *

  Another popular sixties’ image of the surfer, one that was propped up next to the truant and the sexy fashion plate, was the blond-haired idiot. A reporter asked 1964 Makaha winner Joey Cabell to describe the attraction of surfing. “It’s the color of the sky,” Cabell began, “and the shape of the clouds, and the color and shape of the water, and a wave with the sun shining on it all. Then all of a sudden—wow! It just knocks you out.” Sandra Dee’s Gidget answered the same question, perched atop a new surfboard laid across her bed, squeaking with excitement. “Surfing is out of this world! It positively surpasses every living emotion I’ve ever had!”

  Surfers weren’t necessarily expected to be any mor
e eloquent or profound than other athletes, but they seemed to open themselves up to more mockery. Maybe it was the Hollywood beach movies, or the slang, or their struggle to articulate the ineffable wave-riding experience. In any event, when general interest newspapers and magazines weren’t publishing “surfer cult” scare stories, they often made surfers look like sun-baked dunces.

  East Coast journalists were the first to publicly laugh at surfers. The sport had jumped across to the Atlantic Seaboard and was thriving on beaches from Florida to New England, but it was still viewed as a quintessential Southern California product—making it kooky almost by definition. Stepping on it was just a casual way to reassert the East Coast’s metropolitan superiority. New York writer Gilbert Rogin kept a smirk in place for nearly the entire length of “An Odd Sport and an Unusual Champion,” his 1965 Sports Illustrated article focusing on teenaged surfer Joyce Hoffman, the reigning women’s world champion. Rogin took a few pokes at surfing in his own voice, but mostly just served up quotes by Hoffman that seemed cherry-picked to make her and the sport in general look ridiculous.

  “THE PACIFIC IS WASHING UP NEW TROUBLES ON THE WEST COAST—THE SURFBOARD RIDERS. SOME ARE CARE-FREE SUN WORSHIPPERS, BUT OTHERS ARE SCUM. LAWLESSNESS, TRUANCY, TEENAGE DRINKING, SEX PARTIES-THESE ARE THE THINGS CHARGED AGAINST THE SURFERS BY MANY POLICE AND PROPERTY OWNERS.”

  —The Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, 1961

  “I’m taller than the other girl surfers,” Hoffman says of her competitive peers, “not fatter. Most are real heavyset. I like to be skinny. If I get any bigger I’ll die. Do I diet? Oh boy!” She doesn’t read surf magazines because they’re “full of stupid stories and stuff.” School was okay, but could be better. “My dad doesn’t give me money for A’s. It’s horrible!”

  Halfway through the article, Rogin detoured for an interview with North Shore big-wave heavy Fred Van Dyke, who mused on the hidden motives of those who paddle out into huge surf. “Surfing should be fun. It’s not fun. It’s absolute terror. Big-wave riders are scared people . . . they have to go out there to prove they’re not afraid, to prove their masculinity.” Van Dyke was just warming up. “Most big-wave riders,” he concluded, “are latent homosexuals.” Van Dyke spent years explaining that he didn’t mean queer homosexuals, but the Freudian kind, where guys want to do guys-only stuff—like surf—and only care about what other guys think of them. All perfectly true. Nobody was listening, though. Van Dyke wore the quote around his neck for the rest of his life.

  And so it went throughout the boom, and after. Athlete, adventurer, gigolo, hoodlum, dimwit—in terms of public image, the surfer could be seen in nearly any way that suited the viewer.

  The Hodad Problem

  The origins for the word “hodad” are long forgotten, but it came into use during the fifties and was popular enough to get an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary: “An ill-mannered or boastful surfer.” According to the sport’s nascent organizational establishment, “hodads” were interchangeable with the “bad element,” and their actions were responsible for what was often called “the surfing problem.” The United States Surfing Association and the surf press did a lot of hand-wringing over this issue during the early boom years. Surfer’s John Severson said it was time to launch a “clean-up campaign” from within the ranks. Surfing Illustrated editorialized that all the “tough boys” and “showoffs” and “nonconformists” in the sport might benefit from a city-enforced program of surfboard confiscation. And the USSA told anyone who’d listen that the sport’s troublemakers weren’t real surfers at all, but “pseudo surfers”—attention-seeking punks and pretenders who’d recently attached themselves to the new “in” thing.

  It was hard to swallow. Mickey Dora, the Windansea gang, and plenty of other surfing trendsetters were all proud, open reprobates. True, there were a few “pseudo surfers” lurking on the fringe, but not many. The rogue element in surfing was everywhere—magazine covers included—and not all that menacing. Proof of this would come twenty years later, when it would be hard to find a boomer-age surfer who didn’t want to talk about his glory days of dropped baggies, stolen food, and lifeguard abuse.

  There were other forces at work. Stern, responsible-sounding leadership was good for business. The surf industry was already trending up, and from the manufacturers’ point of view, the bottom line could only improve if the sport was handed over to the USSA and its approved list of surf clubs—as well as organizations like the LA County lifeguards and the YMCA, both of whom now offered classes in surf instruction and safety.

  FRED VAN DYKE (LEFT), SUNSET BEACH.

  But the “clean surfing” campaign wasn’t all blame-shifting and semicollusive business tactics. Severson and his fellow magazine editors were also concerned about the growing number of beach towns passing restrictive surfing laws and regulations. This was hurting surfing for everyone, and hooliganism—real or perceived—was the main cause.

  Antisurfing legislation began during the late 1950s in Santa Monica, Huntington Beach, San Clemente, and San Diego. Rules were different from town to town, but board surfing was generally prohibited during summer months from late morning until late afternoon, except in designated surfing areas, which were often pitiably small and miles apart. Lifeguards raised a bright yellow flag with a solid black circle in the middle to indicate nonsurfing hours. Five or ten minutes after the flag went up, the water was usually cleared. Surfers who stayed out and got caught were fined.

  Laguna Beach took things a step further in 1961 with a mandatory surfboard licensing program, which included a five-dollar registration fee. Newport not only levied a “surfing tax” on resident wave-riders, it used the collected money to police the beaches. Enforcement was spotty in both towns, but if a surfer was brought into the local police station for some other reason, he could get dinged for fees owed.

  Property owners who showed up at city council meetings to report any bad-surfer experiences were usually given a sympathetic hearing; John Severson and the USSA believed—not entirely without reason—that there was a punitive edge to some of the law-making that resulted. There was no real reason that a surfing-only zone should be reduced to a cramped 180 feet in width, as was the case in Newport. Ten dollars for a Huntington Beach blackball violation seemed outrageous.

  In fact, many restrictions were a simple matter of public safety. The American surfing population shot up exponentially during the boom, but the overwhelming majority of beachgoers on a given summer afternoon were swimmers and nonsurfers, and they had every right to enjoy the ocean without having to dodge careening 25-pound surfboards. It was common sense to keep the two groups apart. A little blackball flexibility would have been welcome—letting surfers ride if there were no swimmers in the water, for example. But on-the-fly regulation is tough. Lifeguards did as they were told, followed the blackball schedule as written, raised the flag, and for the most part stoically ignored the shouted insults and raised middle fingers from the lineup.

  Furthermore, not every council decision went against the surfers. Malibu was designated a boardriding-only beach in the summer of 1960. San Diego taxpayers spent more than $125,000 to create the Tourmaline Surfing Park in Pacific Beach, which opened in 1964. Windansea was a boardriding-only beach, and local lifeguards would occasionally ticket bathers who refused to leave the surfing area. None of California’s A-grade breaks were under regulatory threat, in fact. The no-surf zones were located on popular sand-fronted beachbreaks, where swimming was easy. At Malibu, Rincon, Swami’s—all the hot point- and reef-breaks—there were no surfing restrictions at all.

  But the worrying continued. Each new piece of antisurf legislation was grimly reported in the surf press. A Petersen’s Surfing fiction piece called “The Death of Surfing” looked ahead to the 1970s, when just three West Coast beaches remained open to surfers, and wave-rationing was law. In a Surfer editorial, John Severson warned that “if conditions continue . . . it’s likely that surfing will be outlawed in most cities,
if not the whole State.” The sport was at a crossroads, Severson wrote in a separate editorial: “It’s the start of a new era . . . or it’s the end of surfing!”

  The “clean up surfing” campaign ran out of gas in the midsixties. Surfer rowdiness didn’t go away, but it didn’t go up, either. Détente between swimmers and boardriders was struck on most beaches. Perhaps most of all, there suddenly seemed to be a lot of bigger things to worry about—assassinations, race riots, Vietnam, LSD. The surf boom continued. The “surfing problem,” though, was mostly forgotten.

  You Call That Surf Music? Dick Dale and the Beach Boys

  The surf boom had its own eponymous soundtrack: surf music. It came in two varieties. There was the heavy Dick Dale–invented instrumental form—songs you could drink and fight to. Surfers, most of them, loved it. Then there was the softer, brighter, Beach Boys–style vocal pop. Surfers, again, had strong feelings. “We hated that crap,” big-wave terror Greg Noll recalled. “These record company guys would come around to the surf shops handing out free Beach Boys records, and two seconds after they were gone we’d be tossing the records out the back door into the dumpster.”

  Before that, there was just music to surf by. West Coast jazz had been the hep wave-rider’s music of choice during the mid-to-late-fifties. In 1958, John Severson opened Surf Safari with Henry Mancini’s horn-blaring Peter Gunn theme, and the crowd response blew the roof off of several dozen California auditoriums. The same year, alto sax player Bud Shank scored Bruce Brown’s film Slippery When Wet, resulting in a first-of-its-kind surf movie album soundtrack. Shank returned in 1960 to provide the score for Brown’s Barefoot Adventure, and that soundtrack sold over ten thousand copies—respectable numbers for a jazz recording.